---
title: "Create your first check | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "A step-by-step tutorial on how to create your first Grafana Synthetic Monitoring check"
---

# Create your first check

This tutorial shows how to get started with Synthetic Monitoring by creating a check, and visualizing the data that’s collected from a test execution.

In this tutorial you will:

- Create a [ping check](/docs/grafana-cloud/testing/synthetic-monitoring/create-checks/checks/ping/)
- Visualize your check dashboard
- Inspect logs created from your test executions

## Before you begin

To create your first Synthetic Monitoring check, you must have the following:

- A Grafana instance with [Synthetic Monitoring set up](/docs/grafana-cloud/testing/synthetic-monitoring/set-up/).

## Create a ping check

To set up your first check, you can ping a target system to see if it’s reachable by sending a network packet to the host and waiting for a response. That’s the simplest check for system availability.

To create a ping check:

1. Log in to your Grafana instance.
2. On the left-side menu, select **Testing & synthetics > Synthetics**.
3. Click **Initialize the plugin** if this is your first time using Synthetics.
4. Click **Create a check** or **Add new check**.
5. Choose **Ping** as your check type under the supported protocols on the API Endpoint card.
6. In the **New API Endpoint check** page, you’ll see five steps.
   
   1. In the **Request** step:
      
      1. Enter a **Job name**.
      2. Enter `grafana.com` for the **Request target**.
      3. Click **Execution** in the sidebar to go the last step.
   2. In the **Execution** step:
      
      1. Select the **Probe locations** to test from, or click **All** to test from all locations.
      2. You can leave the **Frequency** parameter with its default value.
      3. Click **Submit** to create your check.

After your click **Submit**, you’ll see the **Checks** page with your check added to the list. Synthetic Monitoring starts executing your check with the frequency you configured, and the Uptime, Reachability, and Latency fields will show information after it has been executed a few times.

## View a check’s dashboard

To view the dashboard for the check you just created:

- From the **Checks** page, click **View dashboard** on the check card.

The check dashboard includes a few different panels, such as **Uptime**, **Reachability**, **Average latency**, **Error rate by probe**, and **Logs for failed checks**. You can also filter out the dashboard information by using the **probe** and the time picker.

If you have [set up alerts](/docs/grafana-cloud/testing/synthetic-monitoring/configure-alerts/) for a check, you can also use the **Alerts firing** and **alerts pending** toggles to overlay alert information on the dashboard.

For each panel, you can also hover over it, click the menu icon, and select **Explore** or **Copy JSON** to copy the panel to your own dashboards. Refer to [Create a dashboard](/docs/grafana/latest/dashboards/build-dashboards/create-dashboard/) for more details.

## View check logs

You can view the check metrics or logs by using the Grafana Explore feature.

1. Click **Explore** on the left-side menu.
2. Choose your Loki data source from the data source picker drop-down list. The data source name follows the naming convention `grafana-cloud-INSTANCE_NAME-logs`.
3. Under **Label filters**, select **check\_name** as the label, and select **ping** as the value.
4. Click **Run query**, or press Shift+Enter.

You’ll see a panel with the logs collected for all ping checks in your Grafana instance.

The logs can be useful if you want to see more detailed information about how your check behaves, whether it’s passing or failing, or if you want to create a custom panel with specific filter options.

Refer to the [Loki LogQL](/docs/grafana-cloud/connect-externally-hosted/data-sources/loki//) documentation if you want to customize the query you’re using.

## Next steps

With a check created, you can:

- Refer to [Check types](/docs/grafana-cloud/testing/synthetic-monitoring/create-checks/checks/) to get an overview of other types of checks and additional things you can do with Synthetic Monitoring.
- Refer to [Synthetic Monitoring alerting](/docs/grafana-cloud/testing/synthetic-monitoring/configure-alerts/) to learn how to create an alert and be notified in case your check fails.